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Elasticity a feature
To Gartner's Mitchell Smith, the notion of elasticity inherent in doing things "in a cloud way", the idea that you run at large capacity (like scale) but automatically revert to smaller consumption of infrastructure, is a key distinction. "This elasticity of getting big and small, is really what sets the cloud concept apart from other types of distributed computing," the Gartner Fellow says.
At the recent InterOp conference, a panel discussion of "cloud makers"-including Strangeloop, Hyperic, and GoGrid- focused on the elasticity concept, "What Elastic Capacity means for IT Operations," explaining the flexibility the cloud can offer. David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, did a writeup of the event on his blog in which he admitted that many enterprise IT conference goers seemed more cautiously interested in learning more than already steeped in familiarity based on projects at home.
Today, experts guestimate that less than 10% of computing is handled by the cloud, but Golden thinks the model will steadily become more popular over the next five years. IDC expects IT spending on cloud-based services to grow threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012. Early work has tended to focus on access to more affordable infrastructure and applications that have variable use patterns, notes Golden. "Our clients are trying to get beyond the broad concepts and get started on projects," he says of his work.
He discussed a project done for Silicon Valley Education Foundation, which uses a peer learning collaborative tool to file and share lesson plans and is used by 13,500 teachers and 260,000 students throughout Santa Clara County. A cloud based approach was adopted to set up the equivalent of co-location for continuity. "They got full redundancy for 50% of the cost of the alternative backup solution," Golden says.
Stuart Charlton, chief software architect for Elastra, San Francisco says the cloud-based computing market is developing for use cases that include applications for business intelligence analysis of large data sets. (As widely reported, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Johnson & Johnson and Genetech are among the pharmaceutical companies that are piloting various use cases, including data analysis.)
In the case of Elastra, capabilities delivered in the cloud support the mapping (and automating the transfer of) computing environments as part of the server consolidation process. "So, what needed to be done before in several steps, with plenty of manual work involved can be done much more efficiently," he explains.
"Nearly every Fortune 500 company that we've communicated with is kicking the tires and considering how cloud-based projects could work for them," says Charlton. "Pilots have gone on throughout the recession," he adds. "I wouldn't say there's been a huge increase in demand, but we think this autumn will be a busy time for us."
And tech heavyweights, including HP, IBM (with Blue Cloud), Microsoft, and Sun, with its Project Kenai of APIs for the Sun Cloud Service and Open Cloud Platform, are all working studiously on cloud initiatives, even as their education efforts expand to clear up any remaining questions about doing things "the cloud way."
Besides, advocates say, the fact that computing in the cloud is vague is in keeping with other great computing trends that proved to be innovative. This includes client server computing in the late 1980s and object oriented computing in the early 1990s, says Charlton.
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